Halloween Masks Read online

  “What night?”

  “I never told them.”

  “What night?”

  “ You heard that story. About the baby? That baby somebody left on Doc Sullivan's doorstep that night in October of '57?”

  “ Heard it? That's...”

  “The baby,” he interrupted, “was wrapped in men's pajamas, left on the step with no note, bawling its head off. Little boy. Doc Sullivan thought he heard someone pounding on the door. When he come down, nobody was there but the baby – the person who left it musta ran off, he figured. But he coulda sworn he heard someone yelling, ‘Help me, help me’ in a strangled kind of voice when he heard that pounding. Just a trick to get him to come down and find the baby, he figured. So they put it in the papers but nobody ever identified the baby, and this couple came and adopted it, couple here in town. So that was the end of that...so they all think.”

  “But...”

  “Let me finish. I can tell you now – hell, what can they do, take away my badge? What do I care, I'm seventy-seven...”

  “You saw Ed Phillips that night?”

  “I was sittin’ in my cruiser down the reservoir with a bottle. Heat on. Relaxing. I had too much, I admit it...I had a problem then...”

  “But you saw him? After he'd supposedly disappeared already?”

  “He came out of the woods, right in front of me. Damn near had a coronary. He looked at me. We just looked at each other a minute. I should've gotten out, I should've...I didn't. I sat there. I couldn't get out. Then he just stumbled off in the dark and I lost sight of him. I didn't go after him. I didn't call it in.”

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid, boy. I was plain paralyzed afraid. It was his face. His hair all sticking out, his eyes...sticking out. Like a crazy man. And he was twitching all over, and jerking, like he was having a fit the whole time. Scariest damn thing I've ever seen and I can't really explain it now thirty-three years later. And I never told a soul.”

  “And that same night that baby was left on the doctor's doorstep?”

  “The same night. The next day I found out about that. I saw the baby, and the pajamas it was wrapped in. And I almost had me another coronary but I still kept my trap shut.”

  “What was the matter?”

  “When I saw Ed come out of the woods he was wearing those same pajamas. Red and white stripes. Same damn pajamas so help me Jesus.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God...”

  ***

  I can't tell you now the feeling that spread through me.

  I stammered a good-night to the old man. He walked down the street one way, I went back the way I'd come, both of us away from the Yellow House.

  My mind was swimming. It was almost a panic. I wanted to run home to my parents but I knew I had to keep calm. That's when I decided to begin an orderly investigation, a sane and rational examination of facts. I decided to write all this down. Calm. Rational...

  I haven't told Pammy any of this yet. I haven't confronted my foster parents either, though I doubt they know much anyway.

  It was they who had adopted me after Dr. Sullivan found me on his doorstep that October night in 1957. The Mystery Baby, the papers called me then...another town celebrity, another funny story.

  Edwin Phillips kidnapped me, I've told myself. Or fathered me. Then he left me on Dr. Sullivan's step, first wrapping me in the pajamas he wore. And then he'd fled. Fled...naked? Fled where?

  He kidnapped me, or fathered me, I've got to stay calm. He must be my father. That's where I got my red hair. It isn't wild and uncombed; it's short and neat. It isn't the same...

  But I do have this bad habit. I'm lazy, that's all.

  I don't like to shave.

  Post #153

  At Christmas time every year, Wally Thompson could be counted on to decorate the interior of the VFW and to trace the windows in multicolored lights...but this was the first year he had decorated Post #153 for Halloween.

  In past years, Wally had served as Commander of the Post, though these days he mostly just did the cooking for holidays, special occasions, and on Sundays (everything from baked beans to jambalaya). But his creative streak had been in evidence for decades. He had intricately painted the VFW’s seal on the front door, even using metallic paint for the gold sections. From the ceiling hung his painstakingly detailed and realistically painted model tanks, aircraft and ships, including his own (the Russell ) and his brother Bob’s (the Augusta ), twirling slowly on fishing line, hovering like a Sargasso Sea of derelict space ships.

  This year, freshly inspired, he had outlined the Post’s windows in strings of orange lights that lent a warm and intimate glow to the bar’s cave-like gloom. A miniature pumpkin-like gourd rested atop every one of the scattered tables, and at the end of the sticky bar rested a large jack-o’-lantern with a fluttering candle inside, the interior radiance silhouetting a gap-toothed smile and creating a small warm room within this small warm room. The orange window lights and guttering candle shone through beer glasses and beer bottles, making their ambery depths seem like luminous magical potions.

  And tonight was, in fact, Halloween. On the large-screen TV across the room, up near the ceiling, Vincent Price – The Last Man on Earth – drove about an abandoned Italian city supposedly within the United States, gathering up supplies before night fell and the undead rose to lay siege to his house. Bob Thompson, at seventy-five two years younger than big brother Wally, had twisted around on his barstool to squint at the black and white film through a smoky haze that almost served as atmospheric fog, except that it was present in the Post year-round. “My boys loved this movie as kids,” he remarked in a voice wheezy as a bad Godfather impersonation. He’d had half a lung out decades earlier, but sat with cigarette in hand and fifth beer in front of him; his preferred Irish red.

  It sounded like the constant fizzing hiss of a very old movie print accompanied the film, but it was in reality the downpour of rain upon the little building’s roof. Besides being an extra chilly October 31 st , this storm was torrential. As it picked up a notch in intensity and the drumming came more to the fore, Bob slammed his fist down on the bar. “God damn it!” he husked. “It isn’t fair that kids can’t go trick or treating on a night like this! They look forward to it for weeks, they make their costumes, and then they get cheated!”

  “No kid makes a costume anymore,” droned Dick, a Vietnam vet, a few stools away.

  “Yo, chill out, B. T.,” said the bartender, Tommy, who had the distinction of being the only veteran of the Gulf War on the premises tonight. “Some parents drive their kids door-to-door even in good weather. And there are Halloween parties they can go to.”

  “Don’t tell me to chill out,” Bob snarled, turning to face the bar again. “I can still snap your neck like a twig, you know! And don’t think I won’t!”

  Tommy – a hulking thick-necked twenty-eight-year-old a full head taller than the younger of the Thompson Twins, as he had nicknamed them – snorted and retorted, “B. T., you never snapped anybody’s neck, even in dubbya-dubbya deuce. You sat safe in your floating tin can and shot missiles at people you never even saw.”

  “ Safe? We weren’t safe, God damn it! Do you know how many men – how many friends of mine – died on those ships? And we didn’t have those damn smart bombs like you boys had...we had to aim ours.”

  “Missile envy,” chuckled Dick. He was doing a crossword puzzle on the bar top. The jack-o’-lantern’s light flickered subtly across it.

  “And I shot an Arab once, you know...”

  “I know, I know,” Tommy groaned.

  “We were at port in North Africa and I was on guard duty, up on the deck. And I heard another guard down on the dock cry out, and I looked down and saw this Arab cutting his throat. So I opened up on him with my Thompson...”

  “Appropriately enough,” added Dick.

  “...and I cut that son of a bitch in half! So don’t make it out li
ke I’ve never killed a man face-to-face. And did you, Tommy? Did you ever kill a man face-to-face? No .”

  “He’s lucky,” muttered Dick. He took a sip of his Corona, and held the bottle up in front of his eyes to watch the jack-o’-lantern through the clear bottle and pale brew. It looked like a lava lamp he used to own.

  “B. T., go back to your movie, you cranky old fart,” Tommy said, moving to the other end of the bar to draw fresh beers for Hank and Donna Tetreault.

  “Old fart? You’d think the one place I could get respect in this world would be in here!”

  Wally looked up at his brother, then at Tommy. He had missed the altercation. His hearing had steadily diminished over the years and he didn’t wear hearing aids. He’d learned to read lips a bit, but most times kept a little pad by his elbow so that others could scribble notes to him. So conversation was mostly a thing of the past, but he was still able to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with his comrades and his brother, in this place that was like their club house and their barracks. Bob had a wife to go home to but Wally was twice divorced, and had a few rooms in a tenement behind the VFW. This was his real home.

  “I think we’re going to make a run for the car after this one, Tommy,” said Donna Tetreault, accepting her fresh beer. “It’s dead in here.”

  “Always dead in here,” remarked Dick.

  “At the Cheng Du they’re having ‘scary karaoke’ tonight,” she went on. “We thought we’d check that out. You ought to try that karaoke some night, Bobby,” she called down the bar’s dully shining length to Bob Thompson. “With that great singing voice of yours!”

  “I can’t sing like that anymore!” he wheezed.

  “Well, you sure used to sing!” Donna raised her glass in a salute to him.

  “ Slainte! ” he toasted her back, raising his own drink, which shone red against the jack-o’-lantern’s crescent eyes like a glass full of blood. “ Solas na bhflaitheas tareis antsail seo agat. ”

  “Say what? ” Tommy barked.

  “It’s Gaelic, you damn guinea. It means, ‘The light of heaven after this world for you.’”

  “Don’t call me a guinea you frigging mick!”

  “I’m Scottish , God damn it!”

  “What was that?” Dick shushed them, looking over his shoulder at Post # 153’s windowless front door.

  “What was what?” Tommy sighed.

  Now they all heard the light knocking outside the door.

  “Well come on in, for Chrissakes! We’re open!” Tommy yelled. “What are they knocking for?”

  “Tommy,” Dick said, “you don’t think it’s trick or treaters?”

  “At the Post? On a night like this?”

  “These days I can see trick or treaters going after a free beer,” Hank Tetreault joked, hopping off his barstool and taking with him a bowl of popcorn as a makeshift treat. “I’ll go look.”

  Hank opened the door, hesitated at the threshold, blocking the view of the night for the others. They watched him step just outside, under the door’s small overhang, letting the door close most of the way behind him, barely propped open by his back. On the big TV, it was flashback time for Vincent Price as he fell asleep in his wife’s mausoleum.

  “Come on, you kids!” the others heard Hank call. “You want some popcorn?”

  A few moments passed. Hank called again but his voice was muffled by a gust of wind. They saw a spray of rain blow into the room through the cracked door, and just as Donna started to demand that Hank come back inside – as if afraid that he would take another step forward and be swept away into the windy darkness – he withdrew into the Post and closed the door, a befuddled look on his face...which was misted wet. He set down the now soggy popcorn on one of the individual tables, and as he approached the bar Tommy tossed him a towel to mop his face with.

  “What was that?” Wally asked. He had a husky voice like his brother’s but louder and deeper. Where Bob had always been small, and was all the more so now, withered and bent and with a cane leaning against the bar beside him, Wally was tall and sported a formidable gut. Where Bob was more or less consistently ill-tempered, Wally saved his temper up for rare but monumental bursts of fury. He wore a concerned look of confusion as he watched Hank reseat himself.

  Dick shrugged at Wally, then turned to listen to Hank.

  “It was two trick or treaters after all,” Hank reported to his wife and his friends. “Looked like two Chinese kids...they were hanging back in the parking lot, standing there in the rain without an umbrella and not a parent in sight. Maybe they don’t know how to trick or treat right, being Chinese.”

  “Maybe they were playing a prank,” Tommy the bartender suggested bitterly.

  “They were too shy to come to you?” Donna asked.

  “I guess. They just stood there looking at me, then they turned away. I didn’t see any car they’d come in. They’re really getting soaked out there.”

  “So what were they dressed up as?” asked Tommy idly.

  “Oh, man, they had on this horrible makeup. Scars...you know...really good Hollywood style stuff. When I was a kid you might make up as a clown or smudge a little black on your cheeks for a pirate beard and that was it. An adult must’ve helped these kids do it. I don’t know how the younger one got his bottom jaw to look like it was all torn away.”

  “What did you say?” Dick asked sharply, abandoning his crossword again.

  Hank gestured violently at his own face. “The smaller of these two Chinese kids looked like his bottom jaw was gone. It was really terrible. Gross.” He paused. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “It just sounds like something I...saw...over in Nam. These Vietnamese kids I saw one time.”

  “Yeah. I saw stuff like that, myself.” Hank was a Nam vet, too. “I guess they could have been Vietnamese instead of Chinese, come to think of it.”

  Dick nodded solemnly. Hank saw him throw a glance at the door.

  “What was it?” Wally insisted.

  Tommy slid Wally’s pad toward him and wrote, “Just some trick or treaters.”

  “You know,” Hank mused, working on his beer, “I guess they really don’t know how to trick or treat...’cause I don’t remember either of them even holding a trick or treat bag.”

  “A lot of foreigners in this town now,” Bob grumbled.

  “You don’t think they were in an accident, Hank?” his wife asked. “A car accident? Or hit by a car? You know? Maybe...maybe that wasn’t even makeup they had on!”

  “Oh, Donna...come on, it was makeup, believe me. They couldn’t be alive looking like that. I didn’t tell you how one kid had his arm pulled up in his sleeve to look like he had an arm missing, and how the other kid had fake intestines tucked under his belt.”

  “Kids these days,” Bob hissed, then swigged from his glass. “But my boys would’ve loved makeup like that.” He let his comfortably fuzzed vision slide fluidly across the room and back up to the movie, saw that Price had woken up after nightfall and was fighting for his life to get back inside the safe fortress of his house, besieged on all sides by zombies in very crude makeup, if any. The alcohol made the screen, the orange window lights, the candle’s reflection in the rows of bottles ranked behind the bar glow with a soft halo that lent even this shabby room an aura of magic.

  There was a rapping on the window over by the pay phone. They all heard it but for Wally.

  “Okay,” Tommy said, “now it’s obvious we’ve got some kids that are looking to get their pumpkins smashed for Halloween.” He came storming out from behind the bar. He’d been a marine and he wasn’t going to have two bratty little kids harass his clientele no matter what multi-million dollar pagan holiday it was. He made for the front door so that he could slip around to the window and catch the kids in the act.

  “There, look!” Donna gasped, pointing at the window.

  A few feet short of the door, Tommy stopped to look over at the window with the rest. Following the gaze of the others, even Wally looked.
<
br />   Framed in the window and lit dimly by the ring of orange lights was a pale face in the wet murk, its nose nearly pressed to the dirty glass. It was clearly not the face of a child nor of an Asian. Though the man’s hair was plastered to his skull, he appeared to be a blond, with the blandly even features of a Swede or Northern European. Tommy was closest to the window, and he thought that rather than peering into the room, the blond man’s eyes seemed to be rolling drunkenly, not quite seeing those inside, as if he were on some potent drugs.

  “Very funny,” Tommy said. “A riot.” Then he lunged for the door again, and ducked out into the rain, the door snicking shut behind him.

  They all heard him shouting, bellowing, as the face receded from the window leaving only darkness in its place. More yelling. Tommy was really getting worked up about it.

  “I hope he’s not getting into a fight,” Donna fretted.

  “Damn hot-headed son of a bitch!” Bob rasped.

  “Maybe we should go out there,” Dick murmured intensely.

  “And get soaked like him?” Hank said, having already had a taste of the downpour.

  “Wally, God damn it!” Bob said. He was the first to realize that Wally had pushed himself away from the bar and was swaggering toward the door like John Wayne with hemorrhoids. “You’re going to get drowned out there!”

  Wally didn’t know the particulars, but he had seen that pale face at the pane, and seen Tommy go darting out to meet up with it. Wally wasn’t much closer with Tommy than his brother was, but he’d put his life on the line for a fellow veteran.

  “God damn kids,” Bob raged. “I lied about my age so I could join the Navy and fight for my country. Now you see kids twenty-years-old or older who don’t do anything but skateboard and play video games all day. We should be calling the police down here to arrest these bastards!”

  Hank went to the window where they had seen the blond man and cupped his hands around his face so he could peek out into the night. “I don’t see any of them,” he related, his voice muffled by the glass. Not the blond man, not Tommy, not Wally who had just gone out after them. Not even those two children he had spoken to earlier.